Duplicate Contents Issue - which is the best action for us

F_Rose

I have messed up with Google on one of our pages and need to do something immediately, to get this taken care of.

We where very well ranked on one of our internal pages, let's call it blue-widgets. We made some major updates on the pages to make it more user freindly to our users, we added more products, etc.

I have messed up and uploaded the page to two url's in error one called: blue-widgets.html the other called widgets.html.

It took me 3 days to notice what I have done. Of course as soon as I noticed the mistake I fixed it. Left the contents on blue-widgets.html and removed the contents from widgets.html.

In between those 3 days Google has cached both pages. They have removed the right page from the index (blue-widgets.html) and replaced it with widgets.html.

Now the widgets.html doesn't have the contents related to the keywords any longer, it's still in Google's cache and that is why it's being listed.

What do we do now.

A. 301 redirect widgets.html to blue-widgets.html B. Put the new contents back on widgets.html and remove the new contents from blue-widgets.html. C. Wait for Google to put back our original page blue-widgets.html (which may never happen) D. Put a link from widgets.html to blue-widgets.html

A quick response to this issue would be greatly appreciated being that time is critical.

Thank you, F. Rose

[edited by: F_Rose at 2:56 am (utc) on Feb. 25, 2007]

g1smd

7:16 pm on Feb 25, 2007 (gmt 0)

Single page 301 redirect is what I would do, but a link from the wrong to right page would also fix it.

Alternatively let the "wrong" page just send a 404, but that is not at all helpful to visitors to your web site.